Created By Lee

THis Week On Malevolent Quality Control:The moon is littered with My broken dreams. And several dead astronauts.

A favorite saying of mine is "Always shoot for the moon, but if you miss you'll die horribly in space." Never has this been more true than in "Kerbal Space Program", a video game exploring one planet's leap into the stars. That ends with crumpled debris and corpses floating in the blackness of the void.

If you haven't caught on to the theme yet, there is a lot of watching in utter defeat as your space vehicles explode into a thousand shards of metal as they slam into the unforgiving ground of an alien planet or moon.

So what is the game all about? Well basically it gives you an entire chest of LEGO-like rocket parts, structural bits, and science-y gadgets to slap together into a spaceship of your own design pretty much only limited by your own imagination. Then you attempt to fly these monstrosities higher and higher into the atmosphere, then into orbit around the Kerbals' home world, and finally to distance alien worlds. Afterward attempting to get your crew back home without them disintegrating during reentry.

While I am sure my frustration is seeping into this article, it's the good kind of frustration. The kind that drives you to design better space vehicles, have a lighter touch with the controls as you pilot your craft, and not make mistakes like decoupling your primary booster engine during take off causing it to cartwheel wildly into the sky before it slams back into your crew compartment (then explode).

There are many broken eggs when making this space omelet, but it's a lot of fun strapping rockets to them and smashing those eggs into the planet's surface at super sonic speeds. This all makes the victories even more rewarding. The perfect orbit and reentry. The first time you slingshot around a planet and get your Kerbonauts back home safety from the vacuum of space. Executing a flawless landing on the moon without tipping over and exploding. And watching with an amazing sense of pride as your spaceship, packed full of alien soil samples and experiments conducted in zero gravity, splashes down into the ocean and is successfully recovered.

All this is kept light hearted with the silliness of the Kerbals, the little green civilization inhabiting the planet you are helping take it's first steps towards the stars. By murdering their citizens in rocket powered death tin cans. Even as scraps of them are raining down over your space center the Kerbals keep it all tongue in cheek with their hilarious screaming faces on their personal monitors, flopping around as they try to waddle across the surface of the moon in their space suits, and running around the hanger like a bunch of little slapstick minions.

It's to be noted that this game is currently in early access 'alpha', but it's constantly being updated and improved. One of the biggest and most recent additions being career mode. Where the sandbox mode gives you the freedom to do whatever you want with unlimited supplies, career mode sets you up with the most basic of items to piece a rocket together, then pushes you to hone your skill and designs while carrying out scientific missions. Upon completion of these, you are rewarded with more bits to attach to you rocket and new missions to tackle. It adds a ton of depth to the game as it makes you feels like you are running your own space race to the stars, rather then just shooting countless Kerbals into space for your own amusement.

Also to give you guys a heads up, the learning curve is a bit steep right now as well. There are some in game tutorials, but to really start murdering a continuous stream of poor poor astronauts of your very own you'll have to do some research on the wiki page and watch some Youtube videos to get some basic knowledge of the controls/interface. I promise that it's worth it though to get a grip on the instruments so you can slam the big red button to go rocketing into the great blue yonder.

I highly recommend this game to anyone that ever once in a while needs something a bit more cerebral then a twitchy shooter or loves a good challenge. Or has a thing for sending cosmonauts to their doom. At the time this article was posted the game is available for $26.99 on both Steam (for now, but be on the look out for a sale) and at the official Kerbal Space Program website.

Hope to see you out there crash landing with the best of them. Cheers folks and we'll see ya next time on the MQC!

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